Batch Audit Revit Families

[nharburger]

Does anyone know of a way to Batch Audit revit families?
We are having some corruption issues - and the audit process for the project files is not turning up anything. I want to make sure none of the families that are in our library or in the current projects are in and of themselves corrupt. However, this seems like an incredibly laborious process, if i am doing it one at a time.
This seems like the type of thing an Add-in would have been developed for, or some 3rd party software... or even a dyanmo script - but I figured it would be best to start by just asking the forum.
Thanks!

[digihumminbird]

Well, it depends on your corruption issues. In my experience, the Families rarely are the cause(s). More often than not, it's an issue with one of the following: network overwrite (where the Central File has been saved over in-place overwriting both the _backup folder and the file itself); multiple build versions working on the same file; too many linked DWGs; DWGs with coordinates that exceed Revit's limits; multiple Windows OS versions collaborating; file path length exceeding 256 for content in the _backup folder; and, graphics cards. If you've eliminated all of that, then, yes, possibly it's Family-related.

[nharburger]

Thanks for the quick reply.
When you say "multiple Windows OS versions collaborating" - what exactly do you mean?
I haven;t heard of this being an issue before, so long as all of the Revit builds were the same. I know we are all operating on 2017.2.1, but there are some machines in our offices running Windows 10, while others are still on 8.1.

Do i need to get our IT department to deploy updated Windows 10 OS's to everyone STAT??

Thanks!

[digihumminbird]

Good question. I will say this, when we upgraded all machines on a couple of projects to Windows 10 so that all machines were on the same OS, we saw a marked reduction in lag and have had fewer errors. There is a known issue for all peer to peer software running in mixed Windows environments where there are communications lags because of the signing that goes on between the PC and the server and back. Basically, it's as if instead of a regular handshake, the different OS environments are turning that handshake into a super-secret handshake sequence that takes a few steps more to complete. What that means to the end-user is that they run into errors borrowing elements as they work. It's gotten so bad with 8-12 users in one model that every other element one user touched triggered a warning that the model was unavailable. It really meant that the server was still trying to finish the super-secret handshake to check if it was okay to let the user borrow that element. It's the only time I've ever seen two users end up owning the same elements, which was thought impossible and I've never seen that before in more than a decade of managing this software. And, needless to say, this led to a corruption issue where we had to restore the file from a backup. So, if you have corruption running around, a best practice would be to eliminate anything else that might be causing strain or white noise in your end-users environment. This Windows issue met that definition, so we've fixed it, allowing us to find other errors causing corruption like network overwrite, or having the backups set to 1 in the Central File, and so on...
I hope that helps!
-LC

[david_peterson]

If you're having corruption issues with a model and you want to check family stability, I'd start by simply trying to save out all of the families. If the family isn't happy, it'll kick out an error.
This will also allow you to check for file size. Find a family that's excessively large and that might be your problem.
There's several "Family Processor" apps that would allow you to open and save a family. CTC has a nice one with an audit on open option. You can select a large list of families and just let it grind.